How to Make Classic Lasagna

There are all kinds of lasagna, but sometimes tradition wins over ingenuity—learn how to make a classic lasagna, and savor the tastes and textures of tender pasta, red sauce, browned meat, and melted cheese.

-Hey everyone! I'm Judith with recipe.com, and today, I'm gonna be showing you how to make a classic lasagna. This is a feel-good, confident, indulgent Italian classic which we just love. So, what you'll need is 1 cup of diced onions. We have 15 ounces of ricotta cheese. We have 14-1/2 ounces of chopped tomatoes in its sauce. We have 12 ounces of ground beef and 6 ounces of shredded mozzarella cheese. We have 1/4 cup of grated parmesan cheese. We have 8 ounces of tomato sauce. There's 1 egg which we've lightly beaten, 1/4 teaspoon of black pepper, 2 cloves of garlic which we've minced, and 1 tablespoon of Italian-- dried Italian seasoning and 6 dried lasagna noodles. So, we put our heat to a medium heat and we let our-- a large skillet get nice and hot. Now, what we're gonna do is put in our onions. Our garlic goes in there and our ground beef will be going in there too. So, we wanna get our beef nice and brown. It usually takes about 6 to 9 minutes and, after that, we'll drain off all the fat once it's done. So we've drained our nicely brown ground beef into a large saucepan and that-- that's looking great right now. So, we're gonna put that to a medium heat and we're gonna add in our tomato sauces and ingredients, so, and goes our tomato sauce to the mix and goes our chopped, diced tomatoes. Our Italian seasoning goes in there too and our black pepper. And, we're gonna get that to a nice boil, stir it all in there. So, behind me, I have heated up a large pot of boiling water and we're gonna transfer our lasagna noodles into there. We're gonna cook them for about 10 to 12 minutes until they get nice and tender, but still a little bit al dente. So, our lasagna noodles are ready. We've rinsed them. We've drained them. We rinsed them into the cold water and they're ready now. It's for our buildup of our lasagna. Our meat sauce is also ready. It's nice and thick. It smells wonderful and that is ready too. So, last thing, we're gonna do our filling. So, we'll get our ricotta cheese, put that all in there, our egg, and our grated parmesan cheese goes in there too and we're gonna give that a nice stir, so that is all mixed up there, lookin' good. All right, now, it's ready for the build-up. So, we have a 2-quart rectangular baking dish right here. So, we're gonna use this. Now, first of all, we're gonna get about 1/2 cup of our meat sauce and we're gonna lay that on to the bottom. All right, so, once that's down there, let us get our egg noodles. So, we're gonna put half of the layers on here. Now, you can overlap them like this way if necessary or trim them that-- that should be fine. A lot of Italians actually use scraped lasagna noodles, but the curly ones work really well 'cause they capture all the sauce. So, there we go. We've got our third layer there. Let us put in half of our cheesy filling on top there. Now, we're gonna put half of our remaining meat sauce on top of that. So, that would go, goes all the way on, just looks beautiful. All right, now, we're gonna top that with half of our mozzarella cheese and that goes on like so. Great! And, we'll do our second layer. So fantastic! And, again, we'll go with our cheesy filling. Now, if you wanted to do a bechamel filling, that tastes really yummy too. All right, then let's put in our remaining beef on the top. Lovely! And, finally, we'll put on our remaining mozzarella cheese and if you have extra parmesan cheese to go on top of that, that is fabulous too. So, we've put our baking dish onto a baking tray and that's gonna go in the oven now for 30 minutes. Well, we have taken our lasagna out the oven and it just looks delicious. I'm gonna refrain myself from eating it straight away. We've let it settle for about 10 minutes. Now, make sure you do this before you serve up, so that's it. How beautiful, indulgent, cheesy, meaty, creamy. It's a great dish. That is your classic lasagna. Well, thanks for watching everyone. For more great recipes and savings, go to recipe.com.